Death is the price: racial segregation, urban gentrification and the horrors of Candyman

Fear has been a tool to manipulate the public or the audience. Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) is among the horror films that use the concept of the scary city as their terrain instead of confining the action to a flat or a similar specific space in order to create a feeling of isolation. The film has been intrinsically linked to its filmic location, Chicago’s Cabrini Green projects. Today the area has been fully gentrified with the media celebrating ‘the end of an ugly era’ trying to erase the negative connotations of this place of ‘palatable fear’. However,
Candyman’s Cabrini Green remains a diachronic representation of the fundamental emotions linked to the actual Cabrini Green and expresses universal fears and anxieties linked to urban space. Rose’s film is entwined with the cityscape, the social, gendered and racial contexts and the gentrification processes that were and still are imposed, more than a figure of a slasher flick killer. Candyman displays the fluidity of the horror narration, both on celluloid and in reality. The film is examined through the way it builds tension and causes scares by utilising
the social disruptions and fears of its time, overlaying questions concerning gender, race and class on the cityscape, and showing how one’s place – both literally and figuratively – may change constantly under normativity and order. This chapter traces the bleak narratives about the city and the way they are introduced in the structure and the narration of the film, laying out a mental map of urban safety/insecurity, through the way the main characters have to suffer whenever they disrupt the spatial limits set by the dominant ideology and social hierarchies.